Trying to upgrade since the header file got hacked again today. Sorry for the interruptions. Hope to have things back to normal in a bit.
ETA: ok. turned the plugins back on for now. Things should look ok again. We’ll keep an eye on things and replace the header again if need be. Upgrades seem to be stalling out for no apparent reason.
So the UK has “accepted all recommendations” in a commissioned report by Dr. Tanya Byron, best known as a psychologist on various reality shows about troubled kids on British TV (not a knock — she does seem to be quite qualified in the psych arena). The bottom line of the report? Internet sites get a pass and “we need more education,” whereas packaged games get the BBFC ratings put on them in addition to the PEGI ratings already there. The BBFC will now have to review most games made, instead of only the couple hundred they used to.
This is a blow to the games industry — it shuffles their self-regulation efforts (PEGI) off to the back of the box, and puts governmental regulation front and center. The Times Online describes it as “cigarette-style health warnings.”
It’s nice to see more balanced treatments of the complex subject of videogame violence starting to make it both into the scientific community and the educational community. I’ll have to track down this book, Grand Theft Childhood.
From the interview on Open Education:
A number of our findings went against common wisdom. One surprise was how many preteen girls played M-rated video games. About a fifth of girls rarely or never played video games. But another fifth had played Grand Theft Auto “a lot in the past six months.” Based on some of their comments, we suspect that girls play these games differently and for different reasons than boys. Since we bought into the myth that girls don’t like violent games, we didn’t recruit them for focus groups in this set of studies. We hope to talk with GTA-playing girls in future studies.
Cory Ondrejka has a great slideshow summary of the legal and regulatory issues around virtual worlds that comes from the class he is doing at USC. Take a look:
collapsing geography: apoc week 10 (part 1)
It’s funny to see how the old debates sometimes just don’t change — they just move from being flamewars on forums to being flamewars couched in more polite language, as in the case of the Blizzard vs WoWGlider lawsuit.
The issue of running bots or enhanced clients is very very old. MUDs originally were played via vanilla Telnet. Vanilla Telnet is extremely annoying, because there’s no separate input bar from your output. Given that writing a vanilla Telnet client is very easy, it was not long before there were dedicated clients that wrapped Telnet with additional functionality. The best known of these were TinyFugue and TinTin, and today it seems like zMud is still retaining dedicated users.
